Find the right roles, not just more of them

No single job board has every vacancy. Employers post wherever is cheapest, quickest, or already wired into their applicant tracking system, so in any given week the roles you want are scattered across Reed, Adzuna, LinkedIn, Indeed, company careers pages and the odd industry board. Check one or two sites and you are not seeing the market. You are seeing whatever those sites happened to win that week.

Breadth is the fix, and breadth run by hand is what quietly kills most searches. Opening six sites every morning, re-keying the same filters, then trying to remember which roles you have already read gets old within a fortnight. Automate the sweep and the breadth costs you nothing.

• Cover a direct board like Reed, a large aggregator like Adzuna, and at least one source that surfaces LinkedIn, Greenhouse and Lever postings.
• Set email alerts on any board without a decent feed, so the odd role that only lands there still reaches you.
• De-duplicate by role, not by link. The same job posted to three sites is one decision to make, not three.

Most hiring runs faster than the closing date suggests. A recruiter opens a role, reads applications as they arrive, and starts booking calls the moment there are enough good ones for a shortlist. That often happens a week or two before the advert comes down. Apply in the first few days and yours is one of a handful on the desk. Apply a fortnight later and the interview slots may already be taken.

Speed does not mean firing off a generic CV. It means keeping your base materials ready, so that fresh and tailored stop being a trade-off. With a strong CV and a filled-in profile on hand, turning a good posting into a proper application takes minutes.

• Keep a polished base CV and an up-to-date profile ready, so applying is a matter of editing rather than writing from scratch.
• Look at new roles daily while they are still a day or two old, not in a weekly batch once they have gone cold.
• Put the freshest, best-matched roles first, ahead of older adverts that may already be down to a shortlist.

It is easy to judge a search by the number of applications sent. It feels like progress and it is simple to count. But ten careful applications to roles you genuinely fit will beat fifty rushed ones to roles you half-match, and they cost far less of your time and morale per interview won.

Fit is not a hunch. It is the overlap between what the role asks for and what you can actually evidence: the responsibilities, the level, the must-have skills, the sector. Where that overlap is wide, the CV nearly writes itself and your interview answers hold up. Where it is thin, no amount of careful wording covers the gap.

So put the work in before you apply, on picking well. Score each role honestly first, drop the ones where the gap is structural, and save your energy for the few where you stand a real chance.

A few weeks into a real search you will have applications at every stage at once. Some sent, some acknowledged, one at first interview, a couple gone quiet. Keep all that in your head or spread across email threads and things start to slip: the follow-up you meant to send, the interview you double-booked, the role you had forgotten applying to when the recruiter finally rings.

One tracked list turns that mess into something you can run. You can see what needs a nudge, what to prepare for next, and which sources are actually producing interviews. That last point tells you where next week goes.

• Log every application with its source, the date and the stage it is at.
• Move roles along as they progress, from saved to applied to interviewing to offer, so nothing stalls without you noticing.
• Read back over the list once a week to catch anything owed a follow-up and to see which sources earn more of your time.